1. In the fifteenth century there was little problem recruiting sailors to row the galleys (large ships propelled by oars): guilds (business associations) were required to provide rowers, and through a draft system free citizens served compulsorily when called for.
2. The step from buying foreign timber to buying foreign ships was regarded as a short one, especially when complaints were heard in the latter sixteenth century that the standards and traditions of the Arsenale were running down.
3. Historian Frederic Lane observes that after the loss of ships in battle in the late sixteenth century, the shipbuilding industry no long had the capacity to recover that it had displayed at the start of the century.
4. The conventional explanation for the loss of Venetian dominance in trade is establishment of the Portuguese direct sea route to the East, replacing the overland Silk Road from the Black sea and the highly profitable Indian Ocean-caravan-eastern Mediterranean route to Venice.
5. Prices of spices delivered by ship from the eastern Mediterranean came to equal those of spices transported by Paortuguese vessels, but the increase in quantity with both routes in operation drove the price far down.
6. In the fifteenth century there was little problem recruiting sailors to row the galleys (large ships propelled by oars): guilds (business associations) were required to providerowers, and through a draft system free citizens served compulsorily when called for.
7. Water temperature can fluctuate seasonally or even daily and changing level of rainfall can lead to fluctuations in the concentration of chemical in the water or even to period in which the aquatic habitat dries up.
8. From a plant’s evolutionary view point, however, it was also a land of opportunity, free of competitors and predators and full of carbon dioxide and sunlight (the raw materials for photosynthesis, which are present in far higher concentrations in air than in water).
9. They include roots or root like structures, a waxy cuticle that covers the surfaces of leaves and stems and limits the evaporation of water, and pores called stomata in leaves and stems that allow gas exchange but close when water is scarce, thus reducing water loss.
10. These include conducting vessels that transport water and minerals upward from the roots and that move the photosynthetic products from the leaves to the rest of the plant body and the stiffening substance lignin, which support the plant body, helping it expose maximum surface area to sunlight.
11. So the most successful groups of land plants are those that evolved methods of fertilized sex cell dispersal that are independent of water and structures that protest developing embryos from drying out.
